The radial position

Tuesday 10/25/22

Worked out late, didn't work out much. The grind. So much to do for so little money. Ran 2000 stairs, did 100 push-ups, a number of them in that small field behind the old toll booth. It was pouring. Humidity was at 96%. There is an image for you. The ceaseless working, the fighting, the creating, and then me behind the toll booth on a knee, drenched, staring at the grass between sets, back all whorled, body coiled in a knot.

I smelled the grass, the leaves, stayed within that tight, radial shape, imagined back when I was a boy on the same kind of day in much different circumstances, before I was in a war, which is what this is. And all was in front of me, or so I thought. I had no way of knowing I'd be here. That all would be against me, that I would be trying, all on my own, to change this world. To remake it. I thought of how I played ball in the backyard on a day like this, even if I was alone, with the forest closing in at the edge of the lawn. The woods where I spent so much time.

And today, as I held that position, existing in multiple worlds at once--my past, this hellish present, the future I am fighting for--I pulled strength out of the ground. And I could feel it go into my body. And I stood up, ready to fight some more. And to keep going. Keep creating.

I finished what I needed to do on that Radiohead piece about "Creep," which ended up at 2500 words. Sent it along. I wrote a 2700 word piece on John Lennon's demo of "Yellow Submarine," which is worlds better than anything else out there on the Beatles. The money will be so negligible even if I move it. I can put it in Just Like Them: A Piece by Piece Guide to Becoming the Ultimate Thinking Person's Beatles Fan.

Here's tonight's Downtown segment, which was solid, covering Orson Welles's radio adaptation of Dracula, a beyond-bizarre episode called "Weekend Vacation" of the radio show Darkness (which no one seems to know anything about), the Grateful Dead on Halloween in 1971, the 1941 film The Wolf Man, and Mary Howitt's 1729 poem, "The Spider and the Fly."